The Evacuee Christmas

by Katie King

  Chapter Two

  When the children had been smaller, Ted and Big Jessie had met a charismatic firebrand of a left-wing rabble-rouser called David, and eventually he had talked the brothers into going to several political meetings in the East End aimed at convincing the audience of the need for working-class men to band together to form a socialist uprising. A lot of the talk had been of fascists, and the political situation in Spain and Germany.

  It wasn’t long before Ted and Big Jessie had been persuaded to go with members of the group to protest against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts’ march through Cable Street in Whitechapel, although the brothers had retreated when the mood turned nasty and rocks were pelted about and there were running battles between the left- and right-wing supporters and the police.

  Ted, naturally an easy-going sort, hadn’t gone to another meeting of the socialists, and within a few months David had left to go to Spain to fight on the side of the Republicans.

  Still, his tolerant nature didn’t mean that Ted would always nod along down at The Jolly Shoreman whenever (and this had been happening quite often in recent months) a patron seven sheets to wind would suggest that any fascist supporters should be strung up high. He didn’t like what fascists believed in but, deep down, Ted believed they were people too, and who really had the right to insist how other people thought?

  But in recent weeks Ted had had to think more seriously about what he believed in, and how far he might be prepared to go to protect his beliefs, and his family.

  As he was a docker, working alongside Big Jessie on the riverboats that spent a lot of their time moving cargo locally between the various docks and warehouses on either side of the Thames, Ted had witnessed first-hand that the government had been preparing for war for a while.

  He’d seen an obvious stockpiling of munitions and other things a country going to war might need, such as medical supplies and various sorts of tinned or non-perishable foodstuffs that were now stacked waiting in warehouses. There’d also been a steady increase in new or reconditioned ships that were arriving at the docks and leaving soon afterwards with a variety of cargo.

  And recently Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had taken to the BBC radio to announce hostilities against Germany had been declared following their attack on Poland. His words had been followed within minutes by air-raid sirens sounding across London, causing an involuntary bolt of panic to shoot through ordinary Londoners. It was a false alarm but a timely suggestion of what was to come.

  Understandably, the dark mood of desperation and foreboding as to what might be going to happen was hard to shake off, and during the evening of the day of Chamberlain’s broadcast Ted and Barbara had knelt on the floor and clasped hands as they prayed together.

  Scandalously, in these days when most people counted themselves as Church of England believers (or, as London was increasingly cosmopolitan, possibly of Jewish or Roman Catholic faiths), neither Ted nor Barbara, despite marrying in church and having had the twins christened when they were only a few months old, were regular churchgoers, and they had never done anything like this in their lives before.

  But these were desperate times, and desperate measures were called for.

  As they clambered up from their knees feeling as if the sound of the air-raid siren was still ringing in their ears, they took the decision not, just yet, to be wholly honest if either Connie or Jessie asked them a direct question about why all the grown-ups around them were looking so worried. They wouldn’t yet disturb the children with talk of war and what that might mean.

  The next day, when Connie mentioned the air-raid siren, Barbara explained away the sound of it by saying she wasn’t absolutely certain but she thought it was almost definitely a dummy run for practising how to warn other boats to be careful if a large cargo ship ran aground on the tidal banks of the Thames, to which Connie nodded as if that was indeed very likely the case. Jessie didn’t look so easily convinced but Barbara distracted him quickly by saying she wanted his help with a difficult crossword clue she’d not been able to fathom.

  Although naturally both Ted and Barbara were very honest people, they could remember the Great War all too clearly, even though they had only been children when that war had been declared in 1914, and they could still recall vividly the terrible toll that had exacted on everyone, both those who had gone to fight and those who had remained at home.

  This meant they felt that even though it would only be a matter of days, or maybe mere hours, before the twins had to be made aware of what was going on, the longer the innocence of childhood could be preserved for Connie and Jessie, as far as their parents were concerned, the kinder this would be.

  Once Ted and Barbara started to speak with the children about Britain being at war, they knew there would be no going back.

  Now that time was here.

  Just before the children had arrived home from school, things had come to a head.

  For schoolteacher Miss Pinkly had called at number five to deliver a typewritten note to Barbara and Ted from the headmaster at St Mark’s Primary School.

  When Barbara saw Susanne Pinkly at her door, immediately she felt an overpowering sense of despair.

  Without the young woman having to say a word, Barbara knew precisely what was about to happen.

  By the time that Ted came in after the twins had gone to bed – Barbara not bringing up the topic of evacuation with Connie and Jessie beforehand as she wanted the children to be told only when Ted was present – Barbara was almost beside herself, having worked herself up into a real state.

  Ted had just left a group of dockers carousing at The Jolly Shoreman. Ted wasn’t much of a drinker, but he had gone over with Big Jessie for their usual two pints of best, which was a Thursday night ritual at ‘the Jolly’ for the brothers and their fellow dockers as the end of their hard-working week drew near.

  Now that Ted saw Barbara standing lost and forlorn, looking whey-faced and somehow strangely pinched around the mouth, he felt sorry he hadn’t headed home straight after he’d moored the last boat. No beer was worth more than being with his wife in a time of crisis, and to look at Barbara’s tight shoulders, a crisis there was.

  Barbara was standing in front of the kitchen sink slowly wrapping and unwrapping a damp tea towel around her left fist as she stared unseeing out of the window.

  The debris of a half-prepared meal for her husband was strewn around the kitchen table, and it was the very first time in their married lives that Ted could ever remember Barbara not having cleared the table from the children’s tea and then cooking him the proverbial meat and two veg that would be waiting ready for her to dish up the moment he got home. Normally Barbara would shuffle whatever she’d prepared onto a plate for him as he soaped and dried his hands, so that exactly as he came to sit down at the kitchen table she’d be placing his plate before him in a routine that had become well choreographed over the years since they had married.

  ‘Barbara, love, whatever is the matter?’ Ted said as he swiftly crossed the kitchen to stand by his wife. He tried to sound strong and calm, and very much as if he were the reliable backbone of the family, the sort of man that Barbara and the twins could depend on, no matter what.

  Barbara’s voice dissolved in pieces as she turned to look at her husband with quickly brimming eyes, and she croaked, ‘Ted, read this,’ as she waved in his direction the piece of paper that Miss Pinkly had left.

  At least, that was what Ted thought she had said to him but Barbara’s voice had been so faint and croaky that he wasn’t completely sure.

  Ted stared at it for a while before he was able to take in all that it said.

  Dear Parent(s),

  Please have your child(s) luggage ready Monday morning, fully labelled. If you live more than 15 minutes from the school, (s)he must bring his case with him/her on Monday morning.

  EQUIPMENT (apart from clothes worn)

  •Washing things – soap, towel

  •Older clothes – trou
sers/skirt or dress

  •Gym vest, shorts/skirt and plimsolls

  •6 stamped postcards

  •Socks or stockings

  •Card games

  •Gas mask

  •School hymn book

  •Shirts/blouse

  •Pyjamas, nightdress or nightshirt

  •Pullover/cardigan

  •Strong walking shoes

  •Story or reading book

  •Blanket

  ALL TO BE PROPERLY MARKED

  FOOD (for 1 or 2 days)

  •¼lb cooked meat

  •2 hard-boiled eggs

  •¼lb biscuits (wholemeal)

  •Butter (in container)

  •Knife, fork, spoon

  •¼lb chocolate

  •¼lb raisins

  •12 prunes

  •Apples, oranges

  •Mug (unbreakable)

  Yours sincerely,

  DAVID W. JONES

  Headmaster, St Mark’s Primary School, Bermondsey

  The whole of Connie and Jessie’s school was to be evacuated, and this looked set to happen in only four days’ time.

  Her voice stronger, Barbara added glumly, ‘I see they’ve forgotten to put toothbrush on the list.’

  After a pause, she said, ‘Susanne Pinkly told me that not even the headmaster knows where they will all be going yet, although it looks as if the school will be kept together as much as possible. Some of the teachers are going – those with no relatives anyway – but Mr Jones isn’t, apparently, as St Mark’s will have to share a school and it’s unlikely they’ll want two headmasters, and Miss Pinkly’s not going to go with them either as her mother is in hospital with some sort of hernia and so Susanne needs to look after the family bakery in her mother’s absence now that her brother Reece has already been given his papers.

  ‘But the dratted woman kept saying again and again that all the parents are strongly advised to evacuate their children, and I couldn’t think of anything to say back to her. I know she’s probably right, but I don’t want to be parted from our Connie and Jessie. Susanne Pinkly had with her a bundle of posters she’s to put up in the windows of the local shops saying MOTHERS – SEND THEM OUT OF LONDON, and she waved them at me, and so I had to take a couple to give to Mrs Truelove for her to put up in the window and on the shop door. While the talk in the shop a couple of days ago made me realise that a mass evacuation was likely, now that it’s here it feels bad, and I don’t like it at all.’

  Ted drew Barbara close to him, and with his mouth close to her ear said gently, ‘I think we ’ave to let ’em go. The talk in the Jolly was that it’s not goin’ to be a picnic ’ere, and we ’ave to remember that we’re right where those Germans are likely to want to bomb because the docks will be – as our Big Jessie says – “strategic”.’

  They were quiet for a few moments while they thought about the implications of ‘strategic’.

  ‘I know,’ said Barbara eventually in a very small voice. ‘You’re right.’

  Ted grasped her to him more tightly.

  They listened to the tick-tocking of the old wooden kitchen clock on the mantelpiece for an age, each lost in their own thoughts.

  And then Ted said resolutely, ‘We’ll tell our Connie and Jessie at breakfast in the mornin’. They need to hear it from us an’ not from their classmates, an’ so we’ll need to get ’em up a bit earlier. We must look on the bright side – to let them go will keep them safe, and with a bit of luck it’ll all be over by Christmas and we can ’ave them ’ome with us again. ’Ome in Jubilee Street, right beside us, where they belong.’

  Barbara hugged Ted back and then pulled the top half of her body away a little so that she could look at her husband’s dear and familiar face. ‘There is one good thing, which is that as you work on the river, you’re not going to have to go away and leave me, although I daresay they’ll move you to working on the tugs seeing how much you know about the tides.’

  There was another pause, and then Barbara leant against his chest once more, adding in a voice so faint that it was little more than the merest of murmurs, ‘I’m scared, Ted, I’m really scared.’

  ‘We all are, Barbara love, an’ anyone who says they ain’t is a damned liar,’ Ted said with conviction, as he drew her more tightly against him.

  Chapter Three

  Three streets away Barbara’s elder sister Peggy was having an equally dispiriting evening. Her husband Bill, a bus driver, had received his call-up papers earlier in the week, and he had to leave first thing in the morning.

  All Bill knew so far was that Susanne Pinkly’s brother Reece was going the same morning as he, and that after Bill and his fellow recruits gathered at the local church hall, all the conscripts would be taken to Victoria station and from there they would be allocated to various training camps in other parts of Britain, after which at some point he and the rest of them would leave Blighty for who knew where.

  Bill was packed and ready to go, but he was worried about Peggy, who was four months pregnant and was having a pretty bad time of it, and so Bill wanted her to hotfoot it out of London as soon as she was able as part of the evacuation programme, as pregnant women as well as mothers with babies and/or toddlers were amongst the adults that the government advised to leave London.

  ‘It’s daft, you riskin’ it ’ere in the interestin’ condition you’re in,’ he told her.

  ‘Interesting condition’ was how they had taken to describing Peggy’s pregnancy as they thought it quaintly old-fashioned and therefore a phrase full of charm.

  ‘I want to go and fight for King and Country knowin’ my little lad or lassie is out of ’arm’s way, an’ ’ow can I do that if I know you’re still stuck ’ere in Bermondsey? Those docks will be a prime target for the Germans, you mark my words, Peg,’ Bill added.

  Deep down Peggy knew there was sound sense to Bill’s argument. They had been childhood sweethearts and had married at twenty, and then had had to wait ten agonisingly long years before Barbara pointed out to her big sister that Peggy wasn’t getting plump as she had just been complaining about, and that the fact that her waistband on her favourite skirt – a slender twenty-four inches – would no longer do up as easily as it once had was very likely because Peggy had in fact fallen pregnant.

  Peggy was dumbfounded, and then thrilled.

  A fortnight later Bill actually passed out, bumping his head quite badly, when Peggy showed him a chitty from the doctor that confirmed what they had spent so many years longing for, and which they – or Peggy at least – had completely given up hope of ever happening.

  Until the doctor had confirmed all was well to Peggy, she hadn’t dared say anything to Bill, knowing how many times he’d been cut to the quick when a missing or late period, or Peggy having a slight bulge in her normally flat tummy, hadn’t gone on to lead to a baby. Perhaps now they could get their marriage back to the happy place it had once been.

  Understandably, their relationship had struggled as the childless years had mounted, and as everyone around them had seemed to be able to have a baby every year with depressing ease. Peggy had often had to bite back bitter tears in public when she’d heard a woman complaining about being pregnant again.

  She would have given anything to be pregnant just once, while Bill had sought solace in the bookies or the pub, and occasionally over the last year or two, Barbara had begun to wonder if he hadn’t taken comfort in the arms of another, not that she ever dared raise the issue.

  Being barren was bad enough, Peggy felt, but to be barren and alone, which could well be an inevitable consequence if Bill had found himself seeking a refuge from their worries elsewhere, was more than she felt she could cope with.

  The doctor’s confirmation that, as he put it, ‘a happy event is in the pipeline’, had felt to Peggy very much like the strong glue the couple needed to stick things back together again between them, and Bill had seemed to agree, not that he had ever said as much.

  But this sens
e of optimism hadn’t prevented Peggy’s pregnancy being full of problems and worries, as she had continued to menstruate as if she weren’t pregnant, she’d had terrible sickness from around virtually the very moment that Barbara had made the quip about the skirt waistband and more or less constantly since, until perhaps only a week or so previously.

  This endless nausea had led to her losing a lot of weight, and so one day when Peggy was looking particularly blue, Barbara had echoed the doctor with, ‘That baby is going to take everything he or she needs from you – they are clever like that. And so although the very last thing you might feel like doing is eating or drinking, that is precisely what you must do, as you really do need to keep your strength up.’

  Peggy was inclined to agree with her sister about the baby being quite selfish in getting what it needed. Right from the start her stomach had become very rounded – much more so, she was convinced, than other mothers-to-be she met who were roughly at the same stage as she – while her breasts were tender, with darkened and extended nipples that couldn’t bear being touched.

  While the baby seemed quite happy tucked away inside Peggy, the rapid weight loss from his or her mother’s arms and legs and face had made her look very weary and drawn, while her extended belly and puffy ankles and fingers suggested that Peggy might be a lot less happy health-wise than her baby.

  In fact, she had recently had to take off her wedding ring as her fingers had become too bloated for wearing it to be comfortable any longer. Now she wore the ring on a filigree gold chain around her neck that Bill had got from a jeweller’s in Aldgate, Peggy saying that this was an even more special way for her to wear the ring as it held the precious wedding ring as close to her heart as it could possibly be.

  The posters going up around London suggested it was going to be downright dangerous to stay in the city. Peggy knew that Ted would be needed on the river and this meant that Barbara would stay by his side, no matter what.